Sometimes, when I’m overcome with the heady aroma of a 26-pound Thanksgiving turkey cooking in the middle of May (occupational hazard), my mind wanders out the window and into the nearest garden. Today, this daydreaming was made easy by the arrival of the Seed Savers Exchange Catalog. The catalog is a 101-page-testament to the work of the Seed Savers Exchange, an organization that works tirelessly to protect, promote and share the valuable agricultural resources that factory farming and food industrialization endanger. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
 
The Seed Saver’s Exchange are the champion our country’s farm heritage, and are dedicated to preserving the thousands of heirloom varieties of flora that date back for hundreds of years. Heirloom varieties, akin to heritage breed animals (like the Berkshire Pig or Bourbon Red Turkey), are a window into the history of food, marking a vegetable’s migration, immigration and crosspollination from land to land with their names and stories.
 
The catalog includes 6,200 kinds of tomatoes, 5,100 varieties of beans, and 2,400 peppers. But it isn’t the sheer numbers that delight me. It reads like an epic story book whose heroes like Russian Giant (garlic) and Hungarian Heart (tomato) live in utopian harmony with the King of the North (pepper) and Sultan’s Crescent (beans). And that’s just the beginning of the Edenic paradise. They house the seeds of flowers in every shape and shade, 200 vintage (no pun intended) varieties of grapes and 700 different antique apple varieties  
 
As they say in the catalog, “not bad for a program that started as a little garden in
Mid-Missouri.” Not bad at all.
 
Our own little garden roots are taking hold as we prepare to build our next Good Food Gardens this June at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, as a part of their summer-long Edible Garden exhibit. And, since the New York Botanical Gardens work closely with the Seed Savers Exchange, our garden and the exhibit will offer visitors many opportunities to smell, touch and taste the dozens of heirloom edibles that have sustained us for centuries. Cheers, to the Garden of Eaten...